The following paper uses three of Bauman’s interlocutors—Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Cornelius Castoriadis—to open issues of the worlds we create, for better and more often for worse. Bauman uses Foucault to rethink the sociology of the factory as a site of discipline, though the fibre of his argument is also open to Marxist social history from below. He borrows more selectively from Agamben, in order to address more general problems of modernity and violence. The work of Castoriadis appears in a more positive register in Bauman’s work, for his is also a modern and classical enthusiasm for cities as a counterpoint to camps.